Prosopographia Palmyrena. Towards a social morphology of Palmyra

对于对罗马帝国周边地区感兴趣的学者来说，巴尔米拉是一座宝库。在过去的三十年里，虽然对这个古代洲际长途贸易的主要枢纽的考古和碑文研究取得了迅速的进展，但人们对这座城市历史的某些方面仍然知之甚少。尤其神秘的是帕尔米拉精英阶层的社会结构。一些学者坚持认为帕尔米拉本质上是一个由富有地主（“名流”）寡头统治的“希腊城市”，另一些人则声称帕尔米拉的社会主要是部落社会，其精英阶层由亲属关系决定。申请人本人主张部落模式，但目前这仍然是一种无法用证据证明的模式。这个模型需要用证据来检验。为了获得更一致的帕尔米拉精英形象，有必要更多地了解个人，其中一些在铭文记录中得到了很好的证明。选择的方法是轮廓学，辅以计算机辅助数据挖掘。这里提出的研究目的是尽可能多地发现人与人之间的联系：人与人之间的联系，人与集体之间的联系，以及人与地方之间的联系。申请人认为，一个已知帕尔米拉人的人面学数据库可以比以前的研究更清楚地显示谁在帕尔米拉掌权。反过来，这将揭示巴尔米拉在罗马帝国中的作用，以及由此产生的社会形态，用Maurice Halbwachs和Marcel Mauss创造的术语来说：关于这个问题，绿洲大都市是罗马世界众多城市中的一个，还是一个自成一体的城市社会，拥有独特的历史“inter duo imperiia”，正如老普林尼所说。

For scholars with an interest in the periphery of the Roman Empire, Palmyra is a treasury. While research in the archaeology and epigraphy of this primary hub of the ancient intercontintental long-distance trade has made rapid progress over the last three decades, some aspects of the city's history are still poorly understood.Particularly enigmatic is the social setup of Palmyra's elite. While some scholars maintain that Palmyra was essentially a "Greek city" ruled by an oligarchy of wealthy landowners ("notables"), others claim that Palmyra's society was largely tribal and its elite defined by kinship. The applicant himself has argued in favour of the tribal model, but at present this is still a model that cannot be proven with the evidence. This model needs to be tested against the evidence.In order to gain a more consistent image of the Palmyrene elite, it is essential to know more about individuals, of which some are quite well-attested in the epigraphic record. The methdology of choice is prosopography, complemented with computer-aided data mining. It is the purpose of the study proposed here to find out as much as possible about people and their connections: connections between people and people, between people and collectivities, and between people and places. The applicant believes that a prosopographical data base of the known Palmyrenes can produce a clearer image of who was when in power in Palmyra than previous research.This in turn, will shed light on Palmyra's role in the Roman Empire and hence its social morphology to use a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs and Marcel Mauss: on the question, whether the oasis metropolis was just one of the many cities of the Roman world, or rather an urban society sui generis, with a unique history "inter duo imperia", as Pliny the Elder put it.